Inside the Star

Iconic photos that bear witness to the world’s revolutions

For 65 years, Magnum photographers have been witnessing the world’s rebellions. In an excerpt from a new book, the Star’s Paul Watson introduces the men who chronicled the overthrow of the Shah of Iran, the modern world’s first Islamic revolution.

For 65 years, Magnum photographers have been witnessing the world’s rebellions. In an excerpt from a new book, the Star’s Paul Watson introduces the men who chronicled the overthrow of the Shah of Iran, the modern world’s first Islamic revolution.

By overthrowing one of the world’s oldest monarchies in 1979, Iranians won the modern world’s first Islamic revolution. At first, though, the uprising against the Shah was powered more by the people’s hunger for democracy than the mullahs’ religious fundamentalism. As in many revolutions, extremists manoeuvred for control after the Iranians’ common enemy was gone.

Iran’s popular movement for democracy then lost out to theocrats. Iranians had tried to build a democracy before, peacefully, at the ballot box, only to have their freedom to choose who governed them snatched away by American and British subterfuge.

Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh thought it was morally, and economically, wrong for Britain to control Iran’s oil through the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, mostly owned by the British government. He moved to nationalize the oil industry with almost unanimous support from the Iranian parliament in 1951.

With backing from Britain’s MI6, the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency plotted to bring down Mossadegh in a coup that transformed Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi from a weak, constitutional monarch into a brutal autocrat. Prodded by the CIA, the Shah tried to sidestep parliament and dismiss Mossadegh, with the aid of a military coup. A CIA-orchestrated PsyOps campaign turned the screws on Mossadegh with propaganda painting him as a Communist and royalist street mobs shouting for his removal. But the CIA bungled the coup. Mossadegh stood his ground. The Shah fled to Rome.

So the Americans, acting against the Cold War straw man of a Communist threat to control Iran, regrouped and pressed Iran’s military to try again. This time the pretext was the need to crush rioting gangs, organized by the CIA, but blamed on Mossadegh. The ruse worked. Iran’s democratically elected government fell on August 19, 1953. The prime minister was arrested and a military court found him guilty of treason.

That sorry episode set the stage for revolution 27 years later, when the world watched enraged Iranian students displaying once-secret CIA files at the seized U.S. Embassy, after they blindfolded and bound 66 captives in the compound. The revolution’s leader, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, had tried to assure a foreign audience that Iran’s clerics were not interested in ruling the country. “Our intention is not that religious leaders should themselves administer the state,” Khomeini told Le Monde soon before returning from exile in France to lead the revolution in its final days. There was flickering hope, it seemed, for Iranian democracy. Extremists soon snuffed it out and Iranians are still struggling to regain the freedom stolen from them in 1953.

Abbas

The day the Shah fell, Abbas was in a familiar place, surrounded by yet another mob as it stormed a SAVAK secret police compound in Tehran.

The rioters, led by masked young men, were a roiling swarm of revolutionaries: socialists mingled with nationalists, Communists with Islamists, ordinary thugs alongside guerrillas from different militant factions.

Their bond was a seething drive to set Iran free.

Abbas worked furtively with a single camera, hoping not to attract attention.

He quickly felt the razor sharp edge of a knife pressing against his throat.

“Watch out, he could be a Savaki!” a young man shouted.

“Give me your camera!” another demanded.

“But you have just won,” the photographer tried to reason. “You have wiped out the SAVAK!”

Fortunately, they only took Abbas’ film. Soon he would watch his revolution stolen, and with it, his country.

Born in Iranian Baluchistan, Abbas left the country with his family when he was 8 years old.

He returned in 1978 to cover the uprising that would violently reshape his ancient homeland, a quake of history still rumbling with aftershocks decades later.

“When the revolution started, it was democratic,” Abbas says. “It was my country, my people and my revolution. Then, slowly, it was being hijacked.”

Through the mists of time, the decades of sadness and betrayed dreams, Abbas still sees vividly the moment when he realized extremists had stolen the Iranian people’s revolution.

It was February 15, 1979, four days after Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi’s regime collapsed.

A revolutionary court at Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini’s headquarters, in the Refa girls’ secondary school, had summarily tried and convicted four of the Shah’s top commanders.

A firing squad executed General (Manuchehr) Khosrowdad, General (Mehdi) Rahimi, General (Reza) Naji, and General Nassir (Moghadam), once head of the vicious SAVAK, in the night.

Abbas photographed their corpses after sunrise, laying on cold slabs in the morgue. The secret police chief’s lifeless eyes stared at the ceiling while a revolutionary, shouldering his assault rifle, averted his gaze to the floor.

“I realized the revolution was no longer mine because these executions were after a secret trial,” Abbas says.

“Something we learned is that the extremists always win. That was my main lesson from the revolution. The extremists were prepared to kill, imprison, torture—everything. So they won.”

At least for now. More than three decades after the Iranians overthrew the Shah, Abbas sees a revolution still unfolding.